16 November 2015 5:04 PM

Keep Thinking. Thinking is Acting, at least as Much as Shooting is Acting

First, there were all the historically ignorant people ( but, even so, righteously passionate about the supposed lessons of a past they don’t know about or understand). They yesterday compared me with Neville Chamberlain, presumably because I didn’t urge the immediate bombing of someone or something.

Then there were all the ones whose response to my call to ‘Think!’ responded, ‘but he does not say what we should *do*’.

To the first group I have little to say except ‘learn some real history’ and ‘World War Two is not necessarily the only form in which crises come’. Islamic terrorism is not the Third Reich, Britain now is a tiny, insignificant country compared with what she was then, and you are not Winston Churchill. As it happens, such people, being the victims of propaganda and conventional wisdom, would almost certainly have been keen supporters of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy at the time. Most were.

To the second group, may I introduce the radical idea that thought is an action? May I suggest that seeking the truth about an event, and considering its implications and meaning, are at least as effective, and very probably much more so, than a televised air strike on a bit of desert, or a round-up of suspects? Confronted with a mechanical problem, we will generally trust the skilled, calm man with the precise tools, and mistrust the angry man in a hurry, with a hammer, even if he acts more quickly. It is the same here.

Of course I could use this event as a pretext to reinforce my long-held opinion that immigration to Europe should be restricted. But in truth I think the arguments for such restrictions are perfectly good already, and needn’t rely on this horror to strengthen them. What’s more, I disapprove of others using crises as a pretext to push demands they have long sought anyway. So I really oughtn’t to do it myself.

Also, I’d be grateful if those who go on about the alleged ‘failures’ of the ‘security’ services can explain how they would have made such services clairvoyant. Outside Science Fiction and Hollywood, it is extremely difficult to evaluate what must be hundreds if not thousands of potential suspects, warnings and tip-offs. This difficulty won’t cease if more spooks are hired, or more surveillance is imposed. People still have to make judgements on very partial knowledge, and often they will get them wrong. The terrorist, who has almost limitless defenceless targets once he adopts the morals of the murderer, will almost always get through. There are very few instances (Guy Fawkes being one) of serious terror plots being uncovered in time.

I’m still struck by how little we yet know about the perpetrators of the November 13 massacres. Some appear to be (as any observer of these things would expect) petty criminal low-lifes of the sort who often gravitate to highly-disciplined fanaticism. One has already been liked with cannabis use in the French press, as, once again, I would expect.

But on this occasion, much more so than in the Charlie Hebdo outrages, there is strong evidence of a guiding hand.

This is not because of the guns. Guns, alas, may be easily obtained by criminals in France. I note the lack of calls for gun control in France, not least because there is severe gun control there already, and it has had precisely no effect on the ability of such people to obtain AK-47s and plenty of ammunition to put in them. Some acknowledgement of the implications of this, by those who demand ‘gun control’ in the US after every massacre, would be interesting, if unexpected. You can see why they don’t say much.

It is because of the suicide belts. These are very difficult to make, and require a great deal of skill, and discipline, and some pretty tight organisation. And it is also because of the clearly co-ordinated and widespread nature of the actual attacks, in an area they had clearly scouted and researched with a particular and very nasty purpose in mind. They knew exactly which part of French society they wanted to scare the most. And scare them they did. A brief TV film of a group of mourners in a Paris street, suddenly fleeing in fear when a loud noise is heard, is one of the saddest parts of this story. I personally would hesitate before passing judgement on them. The real possibility of being mown down by fanatics in the street without warning is a potent fear.

If the French authorities actually know that this outrage was planned in Syria or Iraq, then I would be very interested to know how they know.

As I have said before, all Muslim terror attacks used to be said to have ‘all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’, for years and years. These ‘hallmarks’ were that they were terrorist attacks committed by Islamists, which always seemed a bit circular to me. The claim meant nothing. Now ‘Al Qaeda’, never in fact anything like as co-ordinated or centralised as claimed, has sunk into obscurity and disuse, and we all talk about IS instead. How much do modern claims that IS is behind such actions mean? I do not know.

In fact, I still know so little about this crime that I am still thinking about it, and about what we should do about it.

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David Brown 17/11 at 3.18am

"At least the civilian population (of France) are not so disarmed as that of the United Kingdom."

I'm not certain if your closing line was a cry for 'guns for the masses' or what, but I struggle with the thought that those who set out to attend church, visit the theatre or the cinema, take part in their Saturday night drinking habits or, perhaps worse, see themselves as some kind of quasi-military street patrol member, should be tooled-up with whatever weapon they deem appropriate.

"It shoud be quite obvious to anyone who gives the matter any more than a moment's thought that it is the West's insistence that Assad be deposed which is the main stumbling block to a concerted anti-ISIS coalition"
PatDavers

Oh dear.
I don't know if you've ever taught a class of children, but let me tell you what can happen if there's a trouble maker among them. Gradually as the year goes on the bickering and problems spread. If your remove the source of the problem everything can return to normal again.

So as I said, if by the Russian's encouragement Assad left and things could eventually settle down then we will know what the source of the tension was. Even if we assume that the Russians have some inalienable human right to insist that he stay in power, then obviously his hold on power was no longer working.

Thanks for this article. Your thinking is always clear to follow. It's a relief to follow the opinion of someone employing cool reasoning. Especially as everyone seems to have taken leave of their senses.
I see that Francois Hollande now wants Europe to come in and help with France's bombing of Syria. Do we allow ourselves to be manipulated by the grief for the dead?
I ask why France allowed it's police force this summer last, to stand and watch as marauding mobs of men threatened lorry drivers in broad daylight and allow TV news crews to film their passivity. Day after day, night after night. Now they want our help to indulge in bombing raids. Amazingly, this has got people animated.
Oh, speaking of people not knowing their history; Piers Morgan in an article for mail online states that 'the last time France closed it's borders was when Germany invaded Paris in 1944'. I swear to God I'm not making that up.

I don't think it is a mistake or an error to think about the recent events and what action to take .
It is still likely after much thought to come to the wrong conclusion.. Britain is bombing in Iraq with a few aircraft , America , France , Jordan , Canada and others are bombing in Syria against ISIS as expected , is it likely that they are also bombing the Syrian Army as well , as the Russians are accused of bombing ISIS and the Free Syrian Army . My point , why is it important for Britain to Bomb in Syria , we are helping out with bombing in Iraq . I heard a TV reporter say to Mr Cameron in a press conference " Is it embarrassing for Him and Britain to be not bombing in Syria , while being at this conference ? " , what a question , is embarrassment a cause to go to further war for , Britain is already doing its bit with its diminishing military forces. The same reporter will in a few months be , asking why so many of our servicemen are being killed & maimed , what will the answer be "to spare our embarrassment" .
A more subtle approach is needed to this matter. Support local militias to fight ISIS , give them guns and support , this matter is not going to be resolved without further bloodshed is it .

" We must have hoped this would happen in Iraq & Afghanistan - but it wasn't to be."

The hindsighted view - foresighted by most in academia - is that we in the west, and especially we in the Anglosphere, simply don't understand the Middle East. We go about our lives and entertainments puzzled as to why the peoples of these desert regions don't apparently want to live like us. Why on earth not? This was the thinking that allowed us in naïve good faith to distribute ballot boxes throughout Iraq after reducing the place to destitution and rubble and declaring democracy arrived and mission accomplished. What was the problem? It was no problem in Germany or Italy after the war.

I lived several years in Israel in the times before the First Intifada. You will *never* understand this place, I was told by the sympathetic locals. And try as I did, I never did. The whole region is a live action version of the tale of the scorpion and the frog. This blog is too limited a place to go into the whole crazy-ass story. You will have to read the books.

"Blair, Bush, Cameron, Obama, Hollande are directly responsible for the killings in Paris as are the CIA, MI6, the U.S. army, the British Army, Nato, the military industrial complex. They are the ones who have made our cities unsafe. And Hollande's response: do more of the same - a measure of insanity."

Unlike you, I'm not qualified to measure the insanity of someone I don't know (or somebody I do know, for that matter) so I will concede your psychiatric diagnosis of Hollande might be right.

The rest of your comment is definitely incorrect. Those responsible for the murders in Paris are the Paris murderers. It was the killers who did it, so it's the killers who are responsible. This is true unless the Paris murderers had their actions controlled by forces external to themselves: be that other persons, microchips under the skin, or aliens.

In 1785 Thomas Jefferson and John Adams came to England to meet the Muslim Caliphate’s ambassador to London, Abd. Al-Rahman. They wanted to know why the Islamic State was hi-jacking ships, taking slaves (the slave trade we don’t learn about at school, for some reason) and demanding tribute be paid and so on. They were given the answer: it was written in the Koran that any country not to have acknowledged Koranic authority was the enemy and it was the Caliphate’s right and duty to make war. Every “Mussulman” killed in the war was off to paradise, apparently.

People blame US 'foreign policy' for the behaviour of these ISIS fellows. Thomas Jefferson had to CREATE the US Marines to deal with the unprovoked attacks from the North African Islamic State.

Here we go again. One day Mr Hitchens will find himself powerfully moved enough to notice that I support him for the most part in his anti-drugs campaign. But never mind.

The point of my comment was to draw attention to the 'crying wolf' quality of the cannabis issue in respect of bringing it up every time there is a terrorist outrage. Has there been an example of terrorism proven to have driven by cannabis use? Does cannabis use cause terrorism? Do terrorists at the cusp of outrage scream 'cannabis is great'?

Were the IRA terrorists on cannabis the moments before detonating the non-suicide bombs? Was ETA a mass cannabis-consuming organisation? What about Fatah? Or the PLO? You can go on and on like this through the history of terrorism. What about the Baader-Meinhof group? Were they all routinely zonked, and if not would simply have stayed at home playing scrabble? What if some terrorists were on cannabis? So what? How would it offer solutions to the problem of global terrorism, driven for the most part by warped ideology and extreme religion? Is 'radicalisation' to be seen as an acronym of 'cannabis use'. It's ridiculous.

So once again I would urge Mr Hitchens to desist attaching the cannabis add-on to every reportage of terrorism. It distracts from both the cannabis issue and the terrorist problem. It is a 'crying wolf' too far in these circumstances.

I come again and again to this blog looking for guidance and hope & come away feeling utterly depressed, ... but I'll keep on reading it.
9/11 happened before Afghanistan and Iraq, I think ISIS and all the rest, was coming wars or no wars. It's a cult, a warped Beatle Mania, which has taken hold in young men looking for something and are united in one thing - their hatred of the power and success of the West ... they hate us whatever we do.
I keep hearing that there was not enough planning for what 'we' were going to do once the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan were won .. but didn't 'we' install interim Government and then hold elections? Isn't this what we did in Germany, Japan& Italy which during WWII were cesspits of evil, and didn't they embrace democracy like a duck to water? Haven't they gone on to become wonderful democracies? We must have hoped this would happen in Iraq & Afghanistan - but it wasn't to be. I suppose it was never going to be easy in Iraq because of all the different factions whereas in Japan, Italy & Germany they were all one people.
I truly don't know what the right course of action to take is.

I think you can't discuss this without immigration in the mix. The change in it and a distinct change from when I was a young teenager 60's.
There was a change that was dawning as I was a mum and becoming a grandma. In schools I noticed, it was a change in language.
Instead of coming here because of our values and in much smaller numbers too, we must encourage their culture and we must change to accommodate and in some case forego our own.
It was hard to understand why councils, schools were adopting this attitude.
Now I don't think that came from the migrants, that came from a change in those in power.
It certainly wasn't expected to happen.
The folly of the Blair years and mass migration, only saw an increase of this and an increase of growing purely migrant community.
The change from illegal migrants being taken to Home Office detention centres and instead, not processed by police but Home office and then not taken to centres, but given vouchers and then taken on trust to make their own way, was the height of folly that has seen the black economy grow and been very bad for community relations.
That areas of this country have become mainly migrant, where it is possible to have been here many years and not speak our language.
Where for years and years a blind eye has been turned to the practice of Sharia polygamous marriages, honour killing, female circumcision, forced marriage, females having their postal vote decided for them. All this is now starting to be taken more seriously, but it has allowed a second generation of young men, to not have had the benefit of having to integrate, not having to follow British values.
To live like many other young men, where the internet and the I phone give them access to an ideology that because of denial is ripe for festering in growing mainly muslim communities.
Add to that drugs, that are blighting many lives.
The young man in the Paris atrocity was known to frequent coffee shops and smoke cannabis.
Yet the community he came from ,where he was influenced by an older brother was well known.
Tim Marshall on Daily Politics, knew of it many years ago when he was based in over there.
It's a pattern, that is there. It comes from a warped version of Islam as Tim Marshall spoke yesterday, that has been allowed to fester.
In my view.

The Paris, atrocities should be another nail in the coffin of the U.K. staying in the European Union especially when it was Brussels, the capital of the European Union now a terrorist hub that is the main weapons black market in Europe where you can buy a gun for €500 a Jihadhist's utopia all happening under the noses of the pompous elite which infest the corridors of power in the ridiculous European Union a place that has morphed into the biggest threat to the people of Europe, because of an out of touch elite that answers to no one.

Syria is in a state of civil war, in which the state is facing an armed insurgency. I's be very interested to know how the government, or anyone else, for that matter, could possibly wage such a civil war without "killing its own people".

It shoud be quite obvious to anyone who gives the matter any more than a moment's thought that it is the West's insistence that Assad be deposed which is the main stumbling block to a concerted anti-ISIS coalition, and that furthermore, the West does not oppose Assad because he is "killing his own people", since they support many other regimes which do precisely that.

Just as in the Iraq invasion, and the Libya bomings, the Western powers are pointing to the incumbent president's human rights record as a tactic to butter up liberal opinion and get them onside in the upcoming violent intervetion to provoke regime change.

Therefore, one must assume that "human rights" is not an issue here, not ever has been, but is just a pretext to get rid of a regime whose continued presence is awkward to those in power in the West.

I must admit, I haven't felt this anxious since the 2001 attacks. There seems to be an atmosphere of hysteria in the air, which is not the best way to make rational decisions. I don't think the people who are saying things like "the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim" really mean it, and I hope that behind the scenes, wiser heads will prevail - bit I wouldn't count on it.

But just to adda few random thoughts, which may or may not be relevant. Someone mentioned the Viking Berserkers, and it's widely believed now that the Berserkers did in fact use drugs before they went into battle. I imagine few people, whatever they think about the afterlife, would willingly embrace death unless there was some other factor at work. It really wouldn't surprise me if you found a lot more cocaine than copies of the Koran in ISIS camps - since cocaine can make a person feel invincible. Probably a lot of drinking and gambling going on too. The point is, ISIS is basically a nihilist cult, dedicated to destruction for its own sake. My husband raised this point when we were watching a news item on the destruction of Palmyra. He said it reminded him of Mao and the Cultural revolution, when there was a deliberate attempt to destroy China's cultural heritage. Didn't Mao say something like "just destroy and construction will take care of itself?" Another thing that comes to mind is Pol Pot and Cambodia. The psychology underlying ISIS seems to be similar to that which has been present in warrior based cultures since the Bronze Age Collapse. It's fundamentally a nihilist position. Fighting and destruction are good things in themselves, they are their own justification, and a glorious death in battle is the only fitting end for a warrior. It was there in the Mongol hordes when they swept over Asia, and it's there in the Norse sagas and the Iliad if you look for it. We, because we imagine people as always being rationally motivated to achieve some goal, think that a person who sacrifices their life must be motivated, if not by the thought of going to heaven, at least by something that they see as higher than themselves. But "warrior psychology" may indicate that this is not so.

All this is rambling, and may not really have anything to add to understandlng the ISIS problem. All I can say is I hope the leaders now make wiser decisions than the ones they've made over the past 14 years.

"I disapprove of others using crises as a pretext to push demands they have long sought anyway. So I really oughtn't to do it myself."

Four paragraphs later:

"I note the lack of calls for gun control in France, not least because there is severe gun control there already and it has had precisely no effect on the ability of such people to obtain AK-47s and plenty of ammunition to put in them."

The ability of international terrorist groups to obtain weapons has never been in doubt. That does not mean that you should allow your local branch of Aldi to stock AK-47 to enable any half-wit with a grudge against a relative, a neighbour or a former teacher to wreak terror in his community. Fortunately, the type of attack we have witnessed in Paris is still comparatively rare. Multiple shootings in the USA are not.

Peter Hitchens asks that we stop using the Paris shootings as a pretext for our opposition to mass immigration. Well, at least I did first refer to the West's bombing of ISIS, and then to the open borders and mass immigration, which do make it easier for such outrages to be carried out. But I would agree that the central problem is our interventions in the Middle East. Without them, I can't see why ISIS, or anyone sympathetic to them, would bother about us.

I did indeed hear David Cameron, right on cue, last night compare the threat from ISIS with Hitler and the Nazis.

The existence of drug laws “has precisely no effect on the ability” of addicts to obtain drugs, so Mr. Hitchens calls for tighter enforcement of the law. The existence of gun control laws, he claims, “has precisely no effect on the ability” of terrorists and criminals to obtain guns, yet instead of calling for tighter enforcement Mr. Hitchens chooses to deride the law! Has no-one else spotted that inconsistency?

Is he even sure that gun control laws have no effect? Drawing that conclusion from a relatively small number of incidents is like pointing to the minority of motorists that are convicted of drink driving and claiming that road traffic law has no effect. No law is ever 100% effective but that does not mean it has no effect.

I'll go along with the theory without hesitation that smoking a (supposed to be illegal) mind-altering substance might well have played a bigger part than devotion to a religion in the mass murder in Paris last Friday evening. I wonder if it will ever be determined.

The last time we faced people as fanatical as these we had to nuke and carpet bomb it out of them.

What Muslim fanatics don't possess in terms of industrial and military might they could soon have in spades in nuclear and biological capacity. But this is not what worries me. Worst of all they are within our society and have the demographic advantage. Their religionist illogic is venerated and protected above all other ideals.

It is the only subject in our society which we cannot joke about without genuine fear of being killed or imprisoned for it.

And while this happens we have silly men in frocks - whose exalted position comes from their belief in myth and fairy tale - telling us that we need to take more Muslim people and must never close our borders.

It really is time for these people who seek to impose so much on us to show us the evidence of God.

The onus is on them to prove it.

It seems that to them any God would be preferable to no God and so these nut jobs are imposed on the rest of us.

If we turn ourselves into an Orwellian police state, incidents like Friday night could still happen. There's no way of actually reducing the odds to nil.

However if it was unnatural premature death we wanted to reduce then we can all play a part. At a rate of 7 people a day it will take 19 days for as many people to die on UK roads in accidents involving cars. We can't stop nutters with guns but we could all set off 10 mins earlier in journeys, not read and write texts whilst driving and just accept we aren't so important that we might have to arrive late rather than risk someone's life with a dangerous overtaking manoeuvre.

Unless of course leaving children without a parent is not as bad if it's a car accident as opposed to a gun in which case I'll shut up. I just have an inclination we can reduce one method but not the other.

Something's different about this particular atrocity. Where are the usual platitudes rolled out by senior politicians; "Islam is the religion of peace" or "this attack has nothing to do with Islam" etc. Even the candle lit vigils, the facebook flags and the illuminated buildings come in for criticism, as being too frivolous, given the enormity of this event. The French President dares to say 'If Europe does not control its external borders, then it's back to national borders. This would be the dismantling of the European Union'.

Thinking is an action, but unless you eventually start to think about solutions to the problem, the thinking becomes pretty useless. If you and your family were stranded on the side of the road and the keys to your car were locked inside, hopefully you wouldn't spend forever bickering about who's to blame for locking them inside.

And the fact that some (or even a lot of) things haven't worked to combat the problem doesn't meant that nothing has worked. If terrorists have had to resort to smuggling bombs onto airplanes in their underwear or shoes (as they have) , then it has become more difficult for them to blow up planes.
The fact that the problem persists in spite of all the efforts to combat it, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem or that we should give up trying to fix it.

There's a story in the World Post (which is apparently a partnership of the Huffington Post) called "ISIS Controlled This Iraqi City Mere Days Ago. Here's A Look Inside." Journalists from World Post traveled with Kurdish fighters and Yazidi fighters to the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar to see how they had, as of Friday pushed out ISIS, who had taken over the city 15 months ago. This was accomplished with the help of US airstrikes. Maybe that's one thing to look at. How could something like that be replicated?

I read another story about a leaked Russian memo which was published in the German magazine Der Spiegel, which suggested that Russia was willing to try and persuade Assad to move aside in favor of a still pro-Russian government that at least stops killing it's people (see "A Grand Bargain with Putin")The benefit would then be that more concentrated efforts could be made to destroy ISIS.

The interesting thing is that if that actually worked to reduce some of this chaos, then it shows that the chaos was in fact started because of Assad and Russia didn't help matters by supporting him for this long. But that's just by the way.

But if we really don't know what the solutions are there is no shame in admitting that. Most of us wouldn't know unless we studied the issue day in and day out. But if all we do is complain, without even attempting to offer any solutions, then it looks like we don't want to do anything. And I guess that brings back memories of Neville Chamberlain.

The big picture is not a few fanatics with guns . Its the demographic bomb . Now ticking away in many of the major cities of Western Europe. One of two probable outcomes . The first is combined with economic collapse our society becomes unstable and can only be held together by some kind of police state. This may even be the reason the liberal elite invited all these migrants . The other is we have civil war as predicted by Enoch Powell when the people of France find they are no longer the majority in its major cities. As is already the case with Marseillaise. At least the civilian populations are not as disarmed as that of the United Kingdom.

Both this calm and considered piece of writing and your column written on sunday are an excellent antidote to the mostly cliched predictable ill thought out pieces which journalists have been producing since friday. Thank you.

In the end this ongoing crisis will resolve itself on Darwinian principles. Either we shall be strong enough and win or we will face the fate of the weak and lose. David Attenboroughs current series The Hunt is a good guide to these matters.

Sometimes it is important to reverse the events of recent history to gain a true perspective of why we have come to this point of a constant state of war. Imagine if a coalition of Arabic and North African countries decided to invade this country with overwhelming force to bring about regime change using spurious intelligence as justification. Brutally bombing Birmingham, London and Manchester killing 250,000 of our men women and children, torturing others, disbanding our police and armed forces, occupying our lands and bringing complete anarchy beyond the barrel of a gun until this country we know no longer existed. What would we do? Many of us would become insurgents and go to war and the Arabs would call us terrorists. Many of us would flee this barbarity. And amongst that, I am sure we would find an army of skunk-headed crazy gangsters to go and inflict what they have inflicted on us. A dark, vicious spiral to nowhere.

Blair, Bush, Cameron, Obama, Hollande are directly responsible for the killings in Paris as are the CIA, MI6, the U.S. army, the British Army, Nato, the military industrial complex. They are the ones who have made our cities unsafe. And Hollande's response: do more of the same - a measure of insanity.

The solution? As PH suggests we stop and think beyond vacuous chest thumping. Personally I do not believe we will find a solution until we stop bombing, stop killing, stop our interventionism and secure these shores. Then we ride this Tsunami where many more innocent lives will be lost, until the wave of young jihadists grow old and ten...twenty years hence eventually the fad ebbs away. What you give out you get back.

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